Loadbalancing Exporter

Available in: contrib, k8s Maintainers: @rlankfo Source: opentelemetry-collector-contrib

Supported Telemetry

Overview

This is an exporter that will consistently export spans and metrics depending on the routing_key configured. Logs are exported based on the traceID (if it’s present) or an auto-generated traceID. Therefore setting the routing_key for logs does not have any effect. The options for routing_key are: service, traceID, metric (metric name), resource, streamID.

routing_key	can be used for
service	spans, metrics
traceID	spans
resource	metrics
metric	metrics
streamID	metrics
attributes	spans, metrics

If no routing_key is configured, the default routing mechanism is traceID for traces, while service is the default for metrics. This means that spans belonging to the same traceID (or service.name, when service is used as the routing_key) will be sent to the same backend. It requires a source of backend information to be provided: static, with a fixed list of backends, or DNS, with a hostname that will resolve to all IP addresses to use (such as a Kubernetes headless service). The DNS resolver will periodically check for updates. Note that either the Trace ID or Service name is used for the decision on which backend to use: the actual backend load isn’t taken into consideration. Even though this load-balancer won’t do round-robin balancing of the batches, the load distribution should be very similar among backends with a standard deviation under 5% at the current configuration. This load balancer is especially useful for backends configured with tail-based samplers or red-metrics-collectors, which make a decision based on the view of the full trace. When a list of backends is updated, some of the signals will be rerouted to different backends. Around R/N of the “routes” will be rerouted differently, where:

A “route” is either a trace ID or a service name mapped to a certain backend.
“R” is the total number of routes.
“N” is the total number of backends.

This should be stable enough for most cases, and the larger the number of backends, the less disruption it should cause. Still, if routing stability is important for your use case and your list of backends are constantly changing, consider using the groupbytrace processor. This way, traces are dispatched atomically to this exporter, and the same decision about the backend is made for the trace as a whole. This also supports service name based exporting for traces. If you have two or more collectors that collect traces and then use spanmetrics connector to generate metrics and push to prometheus, there is a high chance of facing label collisions on prometheus if the routing is based on traceID because every collector sees the service+operation label. With service name based routing, each collector can only see one service name and can push metrics without any label collisions.

Resilience and scaling considerations

The loadbalancingexporter will, irrespective of the chosen resolver (static, dns, k8s), create one otlp exporter per endpoint. Each level of exporters, loadbalancingexporter itself and all sub-exporters (one per each endpoint), have its own queue, timeout and retry mechanisms. Importantly, the loadbalancingexporter, by default, will NOT attempt to re-route data to a healthy endpoint on delivery failure, because in-memory queue, retry and timeout setting are disabled by default (more details on queuing, retry and timeout default settings).

                                        +------------------+          +---------------+
 resiliency options 1                   |                  |          |               |
                                       -- otlp exporter 1  ------------  backend 1    |
           |                       ---/ |                  |          |               |
           |                   ---/     +----|-------------+          +---------------+
           |               ---/              |
  +-----------------+  ---/                  |
  |                 --/                      |
  |  loadbalancing  |                   resiliency options 2
  |    exporter     |                        |
  |                 --\                      |
  +-----------------+  ----\                 |
                            ----\       +----|-------------+          +---------------+
                                 ----\  |                  |          |               |
                                      --- otlp exporter N  ------------  backend N    |
                                        |                  |          |               |
                                        +------------------+          +---------------+

For all types of resolvers (static, dns, k8s) - if one of endpoints is unavailable - first works queue, retry and timeout settings defined for sub-exporters (under otlp property). Once redelivery is exhausted on sub-exporter level, and resilience options 1 are enabled - telemetry data returns to loadbalancingexporter itself and data redelivery happens according to exporter level queue, retry and timeout settings.
When using the static resolver, there’s a risk of data loss if one of the defined endpoint targets becomes unavailable and both resiliency option 2 and resiliency option 1 (if enabled) are exhausted. This limitation stems from the nature of the static resolver, where endpoints are configured manually and remain fixed. In contrast, resolvers like dns and k8s automatically update the list of available endpoints, offering greater flexibility and resilience.
When using k8s, dns, and likely future resolvers, topology changes are eventually reflected in the loadbalancingexporter. The k8s resolver will update more quickly than dns, but a window of time in which the true topology doesn’t match the view of the loadbalancingexporter remains.
Resiliency options 1 (timeout, retry_on_failure and sending_queue settings in loadbalancing section) - are useful for highly elastic environment (like k8s), where list of resolved endpoints frequently changed due to deployments, scale-up or scale-down events. In case of permanent change of list of resolved exporters this options provide capability to re-route data into new set of healthy backends. Disabled by default.
Resiliency options 2 (timeout, retry_on_failure and sending_queue settings in otlp section) - are useful for temporary problems with specific backend, like network flukes. Persistent Queue is NOT supported here as all sub-exporter shares the same sending_queue configuration, including storage. Enabled by default.

Unfortunately, data loss is still possible for any resolver type if all of the exporter’s targets remains unavailable once redelivery is exhausted. Due consideration needs to be given to the exporter queue and retry configuration when running in a highly elastic environment. To avoid a single point of failure, requests can be distributed among multiple Collector instances configured with the loadbalancingexporter. The consistent hashing mechanism will ensure a deterministic result between instances sharing the same configuration and resolve an exact list of backend endpoints.

Configuration

Refer to config.yaml for detailed examples on using the exporter.

The otlp property configures the template used for building the OTLP exporter. Refer to the OTLP Exporter documentation for information on which options are available. Note that the endpoint property should not be set and will be overridden by this exporter with the backend endpoint.
The resolver accepts a static node, a dns, a k8s service or aws_cloud_map. If all four are specified, an errMultipleResolversProvided error will be thrown.
The hostname property inside a dns node specifies the hostname to query in order to obtain the list of IP addresses.
The dns node also accepts the following optional properties:
- hostname DNS hostname to resolve.
- port port to be used for exporting the traces to the IP addresses resolved from hostname. If port is not specified, the default port 4317 is used.
- interval resolver interval in go-Duration format, e.g. 5s, 1d, 30m. If not specified, 5s will be used.
- timeout resolver timeout in go-Duration format, e.g. 5s, 1d, 30m. If not specified, 1s will be used.
The k8s node accepts the following optional properties:
- service Kubernetes service to resolve, e.g. lb-svc.lb-ns. If no namespace is specified, an attempt will be made to infer the namespace for this collector, and if this fails it will fall back to the default namespace.
- ports port to be used for exporting the traces to the addresses resolved from service. If ports is not specified, the default port 4317 is used. When multiple ports are specified, two backends are added to the load balancer as if they were at different pods.
- timeout resolver timeout in go-Duration format, e.g. 5s, 1d, 30m. If not specified, 1m will be used.
- return_hostnames will return hostnames instead of IPs. This is useful in certain situations like using istio in sidecar mode. To use this feature, the service must be a headless Service, pointing at a StatefulSet, and the service must be what is specified under .spec.serviceName in the StatefulSet.
- RBAC requirement: the Collector pod must run with a service account that is allowed to get, list, and watch discovery.k8s.io/v1 EndpointSlice objects in the target namespace; otherwise the resolver cache remains empty and the exporter logs couldn't find the exporter for the endpoint "".
The aws_cloud_map node accepts the following properties:
- namespace The CloudMap namespace where the service is register, e.g. cloudmap. If no namespace is specified, this will fail to start the Load Balancer exporter.
- service_name The name of the service that you specified when you registered the instance, e.g. otelcollectors. If no service_name is specified, this will fail to start the Load Balancer exporter.
- interval resolver interval in go-Duration format, e.g. 5s, 1d, 30m. If not specified, 30s will be used.
- timeout resolver timeout in go-Duration format, e.g. 5s, 1d, 30m. If not specified, 5s will be used.
- port port to be used for exporting the traces to the addresses resolved from service. By default, the port is set in Cloud Map, but can be be overridden with a static value in this config
- health_status filter in AWS Cloud Map, you can specify the health status of the instances that you want to discover. The health_status filter is optional and allows you to query based on the health status of the instances.
  - Available values are
    - HEALTHY: Only return instances that are healthy.
    - UNHEALTHY: Only return instances that are unhealthy.
    - ALL: Return all instances, regardless of their health status.
    - HEALTHY_OR_ELSE_ALL: Returns healthy instances, unless none are reporting a healthy state. In that case, return all instances. This is also called failing open.
  - Resolver’s default filter is set to HEALTHY when none is explicitly defined
- Notes:
  - This resolver currently returns a maximum of 100 hosts.
  - TODO: Feature request 29771 aims to cover the pagination for this scenario
The routing_key property is used to specify how to route values (spans or metrics) to exporters based on different parameters. This functionality is currently enabled only for trace and metric pipeline types. It supports one of the following values:
- service: Routes values based on their service name. This is useful when using processors like the span metrics, so all spans for each service are sent to consistent collector instances for metric collection. Otherwise, metrics for the same services are sent to different collectors, making aggregations inaccurate.
- attributes: Routes based on values in attributes. This is similar to service, but useful for situations in which a single service overwhelms any given instance of the collector, and should be split over multiple collectors. For traces, resource / scope / span attributes plus span.kind and span.name (top-level span fields) are supported. For metrics, resource / scope / datapoint attributes are supported.
- traceID: Routes spans based on their traceID. Invalid for metrics.
- metric: Routes metrics based on their metric name. Invalid for spans.
- streamID: Routes metrics based on their datapoint streamID. That’s the unique hash of all it’s attributes, plus the attributes and identifying information of its resource, scope, and metric data
loadbalancing exporter supports set of standard queuing, retry and timeout settings, but they are disable by default to maintain compatibility
The routing_attributes property is used to list the attributes that should be used if the routing_key is attributes.

Simple example

receivers:
  otlp:
    protocols:
      grpc:
        endpoint: localhost:4317

processors:

exporters:
  loadbalancing:
    routing_key: "service"
    protocol:
      otlp:
        # all options from the OTLP exporter are supported
        # except the endpoint
        timeout: 1s
    resolver:
      static:
        hostnames:
        - backend-1:4317
        - backend-2:4317
        - backend-3:4317
        - backend-4:4317
      # Notice to config a headless service DNS in Kubernetes
      # dns:
      #  hostname: otelcol-headless.observability.svc.cluster.local

service:
  pipelines:
    traces:
      receivers:
        - otlp
      processors: []
      exporters:
        - loadbalancing
    logs:
      receivers:
        - otlp
      processors: []
      exporters:
        - loadbalancing

Persistent queue, retry and timeout usage example:

receivers:
  otlp:
    protocols:
      grpc:
        endpoint: localhost:4317

processors:

exporters:
  loadbalancing:
    timeout: 10s
    retry_on_failure:
      enabled: true
      initial_interval: 5s
      max_interval: 30s
      max_elapsed_time: 300s
    sending_queue:
      enabled: true
      num_consumers: 2
      queue_size: 1000
      storage: file_storage/otc
    routing_key: "service"
    protocol:
      otlp:
        # all options from the OTLP exporter are supported
        # except the endpoint
        timeout: 1s
        sending_queue:
          enabled: true
    resolver:
      static:
        hostnames:
        - backend-1:4317
        - backend-2:4317
        - backend-3:4317
        - backend-4:4317
      # Notice to config a headless service DNS in Kubernetes
      # dns:
      #  hostname: otelcol-headless.observability.svc.cluster.local

extensions:
  file_storage/otc:
    directory: /var/lib/storage/otc
    timeout: 10s

service:
  extensions: [file_storage]
  pipelines:
    traces:
      receivers:
        - otlp
      processors: []
      exporters:
        - loadbalancing
    logs:
      receivers:
        - otlp
      processors: []
      exporters:
        - loadbalancing

Kubernetes resolver example (For a more specific example: example/k8s-resolver)

[!IMPORTANT] The k8s resolver requires proper permissions. See the full example for more information.

receivers:
  otlp:
    protocols:
      grpc:
        endpoint: localhost:4317

processors:

exporters:
  loadbalancing:
    routing_key: "service"
    protocol:
      otlp:
        # all options from the OTLP exporter are supported
        # except the endpoint
        timeout: 1s
    resolver:
      # use k8s service resolver, if collector runs in kubernetes environment
      k8s:
        service: lb-svc.kube-public
        ports:
          - 15317
          - 16317

service:
  pipelines:
    traces:
      receivers:
        - otlp
      processors: []
      exporters:
        - loadbalancing
    logs:
      receivers:
        - otlp
      processors: []
      exporters:
        - loadbalancing

AWS CloudMap resolver example

receivers:
  otlp:
    protocols:
      grpc:
        endpoint: localhost:4317

processors:

exporters:
  loadbalancing:
    protocol:
      otlp:
        # all options from the OTLP exporter are supported
        # except the endpoint
        timeout: 3s
    resolver:
      aws_cloud_map:
        namespace: aws-namespace
        service_name: aws-otel-col-service-name
        interval: 30s

service:
  pipelines:
    traces:
      receivers:
        - otlp
      processors: []
      exporters:
        - loadbalancing
    logs:
      receivers:
        - otlp
      processors: []
      exporters:
        - loadbalancing

For testing purposes, the following configuration can be used, where both the load balancer and all backends are running locally:

receivers:
  otlp/loadbalancer:
    protocols:
      grpc:
        endpoint: localhost:4317
  otlp/backend-1:
    protocols:
      grpc:
        endpoint: localhost:55690
  otlp/backend-2:
    protocols:
      grpc:
        endpoint: localhost:55700
  otlp/backend-3:
    protocols:
      grpc:
        endpoint: localhost:55710
  otlp/backend-4:
    protocols:
      grpc:
        endpoint: localhost:55720

processors:

exporters:
  debug:
  loadbalancing:
    protocol:
      otlp:
        timeout: 1s
        tls:
          insecure: true
    resolver:
      static:
        hostnames:
        - localhost:55690
        - localhost:55700
        - localhost:55710
        - localhost:55720

service:
  pipelines:
    traces/loadbalancer:
      receivers:
        - otlp/loadbalancer
      processors: []
      exporters:
        - loadbalancing

    traces/backend-1:
      receivers:
        - otlp/backend-1
      processors: []
      exporters:
        - debug

    traces/backend-2:
      receivers:
        - otlp/backend-2
      processors: []
      exporters:
        - debug

    traces/backend-3:
      receivers:
        - otlp/backend-3
      processors: []
      exporters:
        - debug

    traces/backend-4:
      receivers:
        - otlp/backend-4
      processors: []
      exporters:
        - debug

    logs/loadbalancer:
      receivers:
        - otlp/loadbalancer
      processors: []
      exporters:
        - loadbalancing
    logs/backend-1:
      receivers:
        - otlp/backend-1
      processors: []
      exporters:
        - debug
    logs/backend-2:
      receivers:
        - otlp/backend-2
      processors: []
      exporters:
        - debug
    logs/backend-3:
      receivers:
        - otlp/backend-3
      processors: []
      exporters:
        - debug
    logs/backend-4:
      receivers:
        - otlp/backend-4
      processors: []
      exporters:
        - debug

Metrics

The following metrics are recorded by this exporter:

otelcol_loadbalancer_num_resolutions represents the total number of resolutions performed by the resolver specified in the tag resolver, split by their outcome (success=true|false). For the static resolver, this should always be 1 with the tag success=true.
otelcol_loadbalancer_num_backends informs how many backends are currently in use. It should always match the number of items specified in the configuration file in case the static resolver is used, and should eventually (seconds) catch up with the DNS changes. Note that DNS caches that might exist between the load balancer and the record authority will influence how long it takes for the load balancer to see the change.
otelcol_loadbalancer_num_backend_updates records how many of the resolutions resulted in a new list of backends. Use this information to understand how frequent your backend updates are and how often the ring is rebalanced. If the DNS hostname is always returning the same list of IP addresses but this metric keeps increasing, it might indicate a bug in the load balancer.
otelcol_loadbalancer_backend_latency measures the latency for each backend.
otelcol_loadbalancer_backend_outcome counts what the outcomes were for each endpoint, success=true|false.

Attributes

Attribute Name	Description	Type	Values
`endpoint`	The endpoint of the backend	string
`resolver`	Resolver used	string	`aws`, `dns`, `k8s`, `static`
`success`	Whether an outcome was successful	bool

Configuration

Example Configuration

loadbalancing:
  protocol:
    # the OTLP exporter configuration "endpoint" values will be ignored
    otlp:
      timeout: 1s

  # how to get the list of backends: static
  resolver:
    static:
      hostnames:
      - endpoint-1 # assumes 4317 as the default port
      - endpoint-2:55678
loadbalancing/2:
  protocol:
    otlp:

  # how to get the list of backends: DNS
  resolver:
    dns:
      hostname: service-1 # assumes 4317 as the default port for the resolved IP addresses
loadbalancing/3:
  protocol:
    otlp:

  # how to get the list of backends: DNS
  resolver:
    dns:
      hostname: service-1
      port: 55690

loadbalancing/4:
  protocol:
    otlp:

  # how to get the list of backends: DNS
  resolver:
    aws_cloud_map:
      namespace: cloudmap-1
      service_name: service-1
      port: 4319

loadbalancing/5:
  # the OTLP exporter configuration "sending_queue" values will be ignored
  sending_queue:
    enabled: true
  protocol:
    otlp:
      sending_queue:
        enabled: false

Last generated: 2026-04-13

Collector components

​Loadbalancing Exporter

​Supported Telemetry

​Overview

​Resilience and scaling considerations

​Configuration

​Metrics

​Attributes

​Configuration

​Example Configuration

Loadbalancing Exporter

Supported Telemetry

Overview

Resilience and scaling considerations

Configuration

Metrics

Attributes

Configuration

Example Configuration